Jean Jacques Rousseau - Page Text Content

2: Jacques's idea of the "social contract," which stated that government and authority are a mutual contract between the authorities and the governed; this contract implies that the governed agree to be ruled only so that their rights, property and happiness be protected by their rulers. Once rulers cease to protect the ruled, the social contract is broken and the governed are free to choose another set of governors or magistrates.

3: This idea would become the primary animating force in the Declaration of Independence , which is more or less a legal document outlining a breach of contract suit. In fact, all modern liberation discourse at some level or another owes its origin to The Social Contract and Rousseau's earlier treatise, The Discourse on Inequality

4: In the Discourse on Inequality , Rousseau had tried to explain the human invention of government as a kind of contract between the governed and the authorities that governed them.

5: The only reason human beings were willing to give up individual freedom and be ruled by others was that they saw that their rights, happiness, and property would be better protected under a formal government rather than an anarchic, every-person-for-themselves type of society.

6: Rousseau also wrote a novel, Emile , which outlined the best way to educate human beings.

7: His goal was to produce an education that maximized human potential rather than restricted it. Both European and American educational ideas were greatly influenced by this work; the American public school system, established in the first part of the nineteenth century, drew heavily from Rousseau's educational ideas.